Burnout: Liam Gillick’s Post-Fordist Aesthetics

Burnout: Liam Gillicks PostFordist AestheticsBurnout: Liam Gillick’s Post-Fordist Aesthetics Bill Roberts
Unlike ‘postmodernism’, the term ‘post-Fordism’ is today in rude health, its currency stronger than ever in the ! elds of social and cultural criticism.1 At its broadest, it denotes the set of increasingly global socioeconomic conditions that ! rst emerged with the crisis of Fordist patterns of standardized mass production and consumption from the early 1970s onwards. Spearheaded by managerial, technological and ! nancial innovations in industrialized countries; spurred by the information and communication revolutions of the last three decades; and stabilized by the hegemony of neoliberal economic and social policy; post-Fordism imbricates the economic, the social, the political and the cultural. Perhaps most in" uentially, and though he resists the term itself, David Harvey has emphasized " exibility as the key attribute of the post-Fordist regime of accumulation, operative at the ‘micro’ level of labour processes in the factory and of! ce, the ‘macro’ levels of corporate strategy and labour supply management, and at the level of highly differentiated and constantly changing patterns of consumption.2 Flexibility is a de! ning feature of post-Fordist economies, but its logic extends beyond the purely economic, and opens onto other aspects of contemporary experience. The result is a widespread cultural logic of dislocation and disruption.
These qualities are palpable in Liam Gillick’s ! fteen-minute-long projected video, Everything Good Goes (2008; plate 1 and plate 2), which depicts an artist seated in an of! ce-cum-studio, rendering a 3D computerized model of the factory set of Jean- Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s ! lm, Tout va bien (1972).3 The artist’s face remains unseen and a recorded voicemail message offers speculative thoughts to do with contemporary conditions of work. The message’s rapid, paratactic delivery enacts its own discussion of the kind of ‘perpetually reformed’ production of ideas in a state of ‘constant displacement’ and " ux that may (but equally may not) hold out some kind of resistance to the instrumental language of what it describes as today’s ‘seminarized, " exibilized, hot-desk zombie discourse’.4
Translated as ‘Everything’s Fine’, or more literally as ‘Everything Goes Good’, Godard and Gorin’s ! lm centres on a strike at the Salumi sausage factory in Paris. Key scenes in this ! lm feature a slow tracking shot moving across the factory of! ces in order to reveal what is clearly a mocked-up cross-section of the building. As the action moves from one coop-like of! ce to the next, the silent actors of the other rooms, still in shot, rest to form tableaux vivants. Godard’s ultra-slow tracking shot is clearly deployed in Tout va bien in the service of a Brechtian estrangement effect. This slow track reappears in Gillick’s video, but here a different kind of distraction from the critical distantiation theorized by Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin is effected,
Detail of Liam Gillick, The view constructed by the factory after it stopped producing cars, 2005 (plate 10).
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2012.00954.x Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 XX | X | Month XXXX | pages XX-XX
© Association of Art Historians 2012 3
Liam Gillick’s Post-Fordist Aesthetics
1 Liam Gillick, Everything Good Goes, 2008. Digital video still. Installation view, The Vincent Award 2008, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2008. © Liam Gillick, 2008. Photo: © Gert Jan van Rooij.
one which seems implicitly to question the possibility of escaping or disengaging from perceptual immediacy in order to arrive at a detached, self-present and critical consciousness.5 Rather than stepping back to expose the arti! ce of the scene for the purposes of critical clarity, Gillick’s camera lingers on the glimmering chrome- plated and white-plastic Apple Mac world of the artist’s sleek minimalist workplace, tracing the clean lines of its geometry, playing with shifts of focus and delighting in its re" ections and shadows (plate 3). Seduced by the surface sheen of this antiseptic environment, the camera is distracted from both the artist’s work of architectural rendering and the disjointed stream of thought caught on the voicemail soundtrack. In fact, each of the three principal elements of Gillick’s video are distracted from the others and absorbed in their own activity: the camera in its close articulation of the designer of! ce’s curves and corners, the artist-protagonist in his precise re- articulation and re! nement of the virtual factory, and the voicemail message, lost in the forward momentum of speculation and projection.
Bill Roberts
The triangulated dislocation of soundtrack, mise-en-scène and spare dramatic content in Everything Good Goes approximates the intractable problem of the interrelation of Gillick’s artistic labour and his works’ form and content. My argument, in this article, is that Gillick’s work is legible as a sophisticated articulation and negotiation of the conditions of critical artistic practice in post-Fordist society, its autonomy both sustained and perpetually threatened by the latter’s insidious cultural logic. Formal and thematic dislocation emerge as the key means by which Gillick’s aesthetic both converges with, and diverges from, the non-aesthetic exchangeability of the brand.
Stewart Martin has noted in passing the singularity of Gillick’s achievement in ‘con! guring the forms of art and capitalism’, in likely allusion to Theodor Adorno’s notion (after Benjamin) of con! gurational or constellational form as a play of aspects – continuity and discontinuity, association and dissociation – whereby conceptual analysis moves towards the non-conceptuality of the aesthetic.6 Through these means, Gillick explores the forms, and formal correspondence, of contemporary art and capitalist production. Yet despite the centrality of this theme, the persistent dislocation between parts in Gillick’s work ensures the dif! culty of articulating the whole scene of his practice. Meaning Liam Gillick, a volume of essays by twelve prominent critics, curators and theorists that accompanied Gillick’s major travelling exhibition Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario (2008–10), was, for much of its length, a notable sample of the sort of fragmentary, occasionally evasive, critical attention that Gillick has thus often inspired.7 If the literature on Gillick has sometimes lost clear sight of what I take to be the work’s central problematic of the relation between art and capitalism, then this also re" ects the intransigent dif! culty of his abiding question: how might culture imagine programmatic social change today, and how might such change be activated, in a world where, it is assumed, the post-Fordist and post-Soviet restructurings of capitalism have effected a radical deterritorialization of power across the social fabric as a whole?
Gillick’s development of a supremely multi-skilled and ‘" exibilized’ model of practice is his way of establishing a homology between emergent conditions of contemporary artistic labour and the frantic rhythms and disjunctions of production and everyday life under post-Fordism, for the purposes of bringing each into
critical perspective. The parallel is neat, since, as Nancy Fraser has written, not only does ‘" exibilization’ name ‘both a mode of social organization and a process of self-constitution’, but ‘it is a process of self-constitution that correlates with, arises from, and resembles a mode of social organization’.8 In other words, the ‘" exible personality’ of the archetypal post-Fordist worker is today valorized in her or his most intimate relations and communicative and creative capacities.9 I shall here describe the complex dynamics operating in and around Gillick’s work as a negotiation of this condition, caught within the very contradictions that the work seeks to disclose, in order to position the artist as a key exponent of a highly re" exive ‘post-Fordist aesthetic’. To do this, I will develop a picture of a post-Fordist dynamics of artistic labour by selectively attending to the unfolding trajectory of Gillick’s work as a series of visual and textual constellations across time, and offering a more systematic account of the con! gurational interplay of its various elements than hitherto provided. In doing so, the argument heeds Adorno’s central contention that ‘aesthetic relations of production … are sedimentations or imprintings of social relations of production’.10 At the same time, the analysis of Gillick’s work demonstrates the manner in which the terms of a post-Fordist aesthetics may today exceed those of Adorno’s own defence of the sovereign artefactuality of the singular work of art. The networked, " exible, deterritorialized mode of contemporary post-Fordist production ! nds its aesthetic counterpart in equally dispersed forms of artistic practice.11
Flexibility Flexibility in the sphere of work is today widely experienced as a friction between excessive specialization and insecurity of employment. Freed up by the rise of outsourcing and offshore production, the volatile hypermobility of capital has greatly increased both the instability and complexity of global divisions of labour, and this has led to the need for endless remixing and upgrading of skills on the part of labour’s privileged strata, especially in the most advanced capitalist economies. Indeed, while the widespread turn towards so-called ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing has redoubled the centrality of networks of communication and information to production in general, a broad division between material (factory) production and immaterial (brand) production has also sharpened. Material production is today overwhelmingly concentrated in globally peripheral areas, while brand production and other forms of immaterial labour are predominantly carried out in major metropolitan centres. Commodity production nowadays moves through material and immaterial phases that are increasingly socially and geographically divorced, while both phases are highly complex and variegated in themselves, and enormously sensitive to the ! ckle tides of speculation and projection in the deregulated ! nancial sphere. Gillick’s objects and installations register this tendency towards the abstraction of form and content that is inherent in the wider world of commodity production and consumption. As will be shown, it is especially in his sculptural work that the divorce is staged, and enacted in precisely the visual mode in which form and content are, or have at least historically been, understood to be indivisible: the language of modernist abstraction. Evoking Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s conception of instrumental rationality, Gillick suggests that modernist abstraction, as the site of the emancipatory promises of the past, has itself submitted to the total exchange logic of the present.12
Over the last two decades, Gillick has become one of the most practically and intellectually restless international artists currently working. His highly proli! c,
Bill Roberts
protean practice has spanned a variety of media and arenas, from sculpture, installation, music, graphic design and ! lm to curating and the writing of novellas and critical texts, as well as commissioned projects in gallery, public and corporate spaces that often take on the character of architectural or interior design solutions. The various outcomes, like the formal and thematic dissonance of Everything Good Goes, are remarkable for their frequent shifts of focus, lapses of logic, formal disunity, and their simultaneous aura of urgency, resolve, interruption and distraction. For Gillick, the freedom to be distracted is an effect of the privileged " exibility of artistic practice in general, but to the extent that Gillick’s practice is rife with false starts, interruptions and a sense of perpetual disruption, it is consonant with a wider logic of post-Fordist " exibilization.13 However, these very qualities also mean that this logic has come into view, as a site of explicit re" ection, with a variable focus across his oeuvre. I have chosen for consideration examples drawn from the constellations of work relating to Gillick’s ! ctional quasi-narratives Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre, from the mid-late 1990s and into the early 2000s, and Construcción de Uno, which has oriented much of his output since 2004. Each of these texts relates to a key aspect of the post-Fordist imaginary: a diffuse entrepreneurial, administrative and managerial class for whom work and life are thoroughly enmeshed, and the semi- autonomous small group in the " exibilized factory. It is in the nebulous gatherings of work that are woven around these ! ctional ‘scenarios’ that Gillick moves closest to a sustained examination of the contemporary logic of production, and where the artist’s critical and mimetic impulses are pressed into their most interesting tension in relation to such a logic.
For Gillick, the key problem confronting contemporary critical art is the disappearance of a determinate object of critique, in the apparent absence of which capital’s perpetual displacements continue regardless. But if, as he avers, ‘there is still the feeling that stories get told, that the past is being recon! gured and that the near future gets shaped’ – if what Gillick characterizes as today’s ‘chaotic opportunistic capitalist globalization’ is daily reproduced through myth, narrative and built form – then art may yet remain a key site for the close interrogation of this ideological fabric.14 For his part, Gillick seeks to outwit precisely this displacement and disappearance, to proceed by way of diversion, detour and uncertainty. His is the quintessence of a " exible, multifaceted and multitasking, project-based practice, perfectly attuned to what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have called a ‘connexionist world’, in which ‘the tension between the mobility of the artist and the obsessive ! xity of those who prosper in the business world tends to diminish’.15 Gillick is a pre-eminent artist-networker and project-catalyst, and Boltanski and Chiapello argue in their study The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), that since the 1970s there has emerged a ‘societal project … to make the network a normative model’ of social and economic organization, of production ‘conceived as a succession of projects’.16 The network is the archetypally " exible form of social organization, and one of its effects is to obscure, and possibly erase, the distinction between work- time and life-time, at least for those at the cutting edge of informational production. For Boltanski and Chiapello, this societal project has been capital’s primary response to the counter-cultural critique of the 1960s and 1970s, and especially to its rallying cries against alienation and massi! ed consumerism. For Gillick, it has propelled the twin processes of the aestheticization of work and the commodi! cation of aesthetics, threatening the terminal eclipse of art’s freedom as a placeholder for social freedom at large.
Discursive Criticality By his own assessment, Gillick’s work has ‘multiple entry points’, though he remains best known for his gallery installations and books.17 In these, he elaborates ! ctive scenarios and spaces that draw on contemporary design interiors ranging from airports and factories to hotel lobbies, of! ces, conference centres and style bars, all the while invoking minimalism and earlier modernist previsions of utopia, notably De Stijl, as their historical antecedents. Riveted powder-coated aluminium and painted- steel frames recall Donald Judd, and the abutment of brightly coloured geometric Plexiglas planes in his ‘screens’ and ‘platforms’ brings to mind Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. The arrangement of these and other built forms in his installations in turn recalls the composite interiors of Gerrit Rietveld (plate 4, plate 5 and plate 6).
During the 1980s, artists of a generation preceding Gillick’s, such as Julian Opie and Thomas Schütte, had adopted positions of variously ironic and melancholic distance from the forms of modernist design. Gillick’s stance towards this heritage is less ironic than it is con" icted; it appears ‘stranded’ between melancholy and a twinned sense of historical contingency and possibility.18 What, Gillick asks, has become of the utopian impulse in a ‘post-utopian’ neoliberal world increasingly structured, or so he suggests, as a competitive and boundless ! eld of continually shifting power-networks, wherein we appear to have witnessed a decisive ‘victory
4 Liam Gillick, Consultation Filter, 2000. Anodized aluminium, plywood, Formica. Installation view, Liam Gillick: Consultation Filter, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, 2000. © Liam Gillick, 2000. Photo: © Roman Mensing.
Bill Roberts
of speculation over planning’?19 As if restating the question posed by Godard and Gorin in Tout va bien, Gillick seems to ask: ‘to change everything, where do you start?’ In the ! lm, the query is met with the exasperated response, ‘everywhere!’, yet Gillick’s call is not for a revolutionary Year Zero. Instead, he posits the reclamation of the concept of design from its consumerist slumber, as a renewed site of resistance and progressive imagination.20 Gillick asks whether the ! gure of ‘utopia’ might be revived as the limit-thought of this expanded notion of design, as a ‘stage … or station in the development of any progressive idea’.21
Design, nevertheless, implies systematicity. To be sure, this is promised or suggested by the methodicalness of Gillick’s working practice, characterized chie" y by a continual relay between published text and installation, or, at its loosest, between a currently operative scenario or literary vignette and the proliferating exhibition practice of Gillick as visual artist. It is suggested, also, by his notable stylistic consistency, characterized above all by the frequent use of pine, Helvetica fonts with occasional forays into other typographical designs, unbroken and superimposed text fragments that recall the tradition of concrete poetry, and bright Plexiglas and anodized aluminium in simple geometric con! gurations. However, systematicity is equally consistently undercut by the involuted fragments that make up the ostensible thematic content of the work itself, and that perpetually defer any kind of resolution or open declaration of political or analytical position-taking.
Commenting revealingly on a split in the Cologne gallery scene of the early- mid 1990s, Gillick differentiates his approach from the more critically transparent work of artists showing at Galerie Christian Nagel from around this time, including Andrea Fraser, Christian Philipp Müller and Fareed Armaly. He situates his practice alongside those of Philippe Parreno, Angela Bulloch, Vanessa Beecroft and others who were involved, during the same period, with Galerie Schipper und Krome, and ‘who believed that a sequence of veils and meanderings might be necessary to combat the chaotic ebb and " ow of capitalism’, leading these others ‘to become sceptical shape-shifters in relation to the dominant culture’.22 In this and similar statements, Gillick reveals his inclination towards a Gilles Deleuze-inspired conception of the global neoliberal order as a space of unrestricted and unpredictable material and
5 Liam Gillick, Applied Resignation Platform, 1999. Anodized aluminium, Perspex. Installation view, Liam Gillick: David, Frankfurter Kunstverein, 1999. © Liam Gillick, 1999. Photo: © Katrin Schilling.
immaterial " ows (of information, bodies, time and space); an ‘intensive multiplicity’ that will continually thwart our best rational attempts to track it.23 In fact, Gillick’s explicit statements on the nature of contemporary capitalism at times feel overplayed, and his characterizations of neoliberalism as ‘chaotic’ stand in danger of naturalizing what, after all, was a meticulously designed and ! ercely implemented programme from the start. Gillick’s victory of speculation over planning was, precisely, planned.24
Gillick’s aversion to critical transparency and oppositionality resonates with the more apocalyptic moments of the post-autonomist account of immaterial labour that has itself become an important intellectual tributary within the wider debate on post-Fordism.25 In the most in" uential of these accounts, from 1996, Maurizio Lazzarato argues that the labour of communication is today all but utterly subsumed within a capitalist logic of equivalence and exchange, directly productive of surplus-value, and the more transparent it is the better it enacts this logic.26 Similarly, the sociologist Scott Lash argues that the ‘general immanence of informationalization’ has irrevocably destroyed the traditional spaces and possibilities of critique, which, now as ‘Informationskritik’ rather than Ideologiekritik, must play the additive,…

Burnout: Liam Gillick’s Post-Fordist Aesthetics

Documents

fordism

architecture

architectural design

buildings

postmodernism

cultural criticism